AI Software – Page 2 – education and deconstruction.com

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The Book of the Week is “The New Cool, A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts” by Neal Bascomb, published in 2011.

In the single-digit 2000’s, Amir Abo-Shaeer taught robotics in a “STEM” (four subjects that would help the United States remain economically dominant in the world: Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) program at Dos Pueblos high school in Goleta, California (a western suburb of Santa Barbara). If he was able to raise $3 million, he would receive matching funds from the state of California to start to build STEM academies all over the state. Dean Kamen’s goal was to have a robotics team in every school in the country.

Kamen was gravely concerned that the United States education system was falling woefully behind that of other countries. He might best be remembered as the inventor of the Segway, but at the dawn of the 1990’s, he also began to change the world in a much more impactful way.

Kamen and Woodie Flowers’ goal was to spark students’ interest in STEM. They wanted to give young people hands-on, real-world skills, not just convey knowledge. In 1992, they co-founded an annual program of STEM competitions for American students called FIRST. About a decade into the program, there were hundreds of thousands of students of different age groups competing in different events.

Elementary schoolers built structures out of LEGO. Each high school team was required to build a robot, and then in the competition, form alliances with other teams in playing a complicated physical game that differed every year, against another alliance.

In January 2009, the aforementioned Shaeer and his robotics team (consisting of high school seniors he taught) attended the briefing that Kamen, Flowers and NASA simulcast– of the terms and conditions of the robotics competitions to take place in the next three months. If their team emerged ultimate winners, they could win scholarships and might be more motivated to pursue a STEM career.

Read the book to learn of Shaeer’s students’ extremely hard work in preparing their contest entry (the robot), and the suspenseful story of how the team performed with its alliances in its very emotionally charged matches against other alliances, and whether Shaeer got the funding for his schools.

The Book of the Week is “Life after [sic] Google, The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy” by George Gilder, published in 2018.

The author explained that Google’s business model is being eclipsed by blockchain technology. Google offers many services for free, and derives revenue from advertising. The author neglected to mention that one sign that Google is on the wane, is that, in 2013 it stopped updating its PageRank data– a measurement of the extent to which each website on the World Wide Web is networked to other websites.

A bunch of tech-industry greats are improving blockchain technology in the form of various competing cryptocurrencies, which are a financial instrument whose value fluctuates (See this blog’s post, Digital Gold). Blockchain technology’s advantages include efficiency, scalability, improving cybersecurity, and the fact that it is virtual.

Google data centers (comprised of physical servers) derive their power from the Columbia river. Worldwide demand for additional power is growing every day. According to the author, another possible power source for data centers is atomic. He wrote, “China plans to build as many as forty new-fangled nuclear plants, the next wave of data centers may well be in Shenzhen.” Considering that parts of China are in an earthquake zone (!), China might not want to end up like Japan. However, politically, it does have a sociopathic disregard for the health and safety of its citizens.

Anyhow, cryptocurrencies’ major cybersecurity feature is that they are comprised of a decentralized peer-to-peer network so they don’t have a central point of failure. Nevertheless, a major rival of Bitcoin– Ethereum– was hacked for a $150 million loss on one of its nodes. Google has all its data in one place, so theft of data and cyber-attacks are much more efficiently accomplished.

One other financial entity that uses blockchain technology is a hedge fund of the company called Renaissance Technologies. Its software mines terabytes (inconceivably large) quantities of data in order to find minute, even obscure correlations between (at times unrelated) variables that allows it to buy and sell securities at a profit. For more than thirty years, it was delivering inconceivably large returns. Until, starting in 2020, it didn’t. The author argued that since the software isn’t generating new knowledge for the world, it is not generating real wealth for society. Economically, that is bad.

Read the book to learn a wealth of additional information about the features of virtual reality versus artificial intelligence in connection with Google and other technological marvels.